Stalking Sebald

They stayed in this cold Trade Fair building for several days, until finally, early one morning when scarcely anyone was out and about, they were marched under guard to nearby Holešovice railway station, where it took almost another three hours to load them on the trucks. Later, said Věra, I often walked out to Holešovice, to Stromovka Park and the Trade Fair precinct. On these occasions I usually visited the lapidarium installed there in the sixties and spent hours looking at the mineral samples in the glass cases – pyrite crystals, deep green Siberian malachites, specimens of Bohemian mica, granites, quartz, and limestone of an isabelline yellow hue – wondering at the nature of the foundations on which our world is built.